New Directions

The Unbearable Lightness of John McCain

I suppose his standing in class at Annapolis should have been the tip off. Almost dead last in a class of nearly 900 graduates, you can’t expect him to have too much intellectual horsepower. Still he presents himself as a man who is sure of his convictions, a man who is unafraid of risks, a man who will go where no man has gone before, and then he changes his mind – all the time. I mean, really, does anyone actually know what John McCain stands for? Other than making the wealthy people of this country even more wealthy, is there anything else? Anything at all? OK, I suppose a few examples are in order just to make my point.

Let’s take financial regulation. During his long career in the U.S. Senate, McCain has consistently supported deregulation of just about everything on Wall Street. His financial hero and adviser is Phil Gramm who introduced legislation that successfully repealed the financial protections that had been created, during the Great Depression, to protect us from the shenanigans of the big Wall Street banks . Now that our economy is collapsing, due to the Republican-created, elimination of regulations for Wall Street, John McCain is complaining that there isn’t enough regulation and is calling for “tougher rules on Wall Street”!

Let’s talk about Iraq for a minute. Remember the whole issue about having a timetable to withdraw from Iraq? Remember when he said he was willing to stay in Iraq for 100 years? Then Barack Obama came up with a plan for withdrawal in sixteen months. Remember that? After Iraq officials said they wanted to do something like what Obama was saying, McCain said it sounded like a “pretty good timetable”.

Long ago, John McCain supported the moratorium on offshore drilling. Almost everyone did because everyone knew that enormous damage had been done to our environment by previous oil spills and that the potential reward for offshore drilling was not worth the potential risk. Then as soon as oil prices go up, he completely changes his tune. Now his mantra is DRILL NOW! (I’m not 100% sure about this. I haven’t actually heard him say it in the last few days, so it could be that he’s now against drilling.)

There is a long list of McCain’s breathtaking reversals on just about any topic you can imagine at the Carpetbagger Report . It’s pretty depressing because it indicates that he doesn’t have any clear idea of where he is going, and he doesn’t have any identifiable guiding philosophy in his life. He claims he is a maverick because nobody can count on his allegiance. I guess that’s not too surprising, but I think a more accurate term (and maybe a more nautical one that his buddies in the Navy are more familiar with) is “loose cannon”.

Putting aside, for the moment, that he has tried to co-opt Barack Obama’s slogan of “Change”, recall his slogan of only a few weeks ago, during the Republican Party convention. That slogan “du jour” apparently was “Country First”. Not a bad slogan, I guess. It certainly sounds patriotic and makes us think that the most important thing for McCain is his country. Right? OK, well, then he goes and chooses Sarah Palin as his running mate. I don’t think there is any need for me to go into the almost limitless number of reasons why this is a really, really, bad decision, but let me just discuss one. What if McCain were elected and, heaven forbid, he died in office a week later. It could happen – William Henry Harrison, ninth President of the U.S., became ill after giving his inauguration speech and died a month later. That’s why we have Vice Presidents. They are there, primarily, in case something happens to the President. So can you imagine Sarah Palin becoming President of the U.S. in February 2009? She would be President for the next four years. Seriously, is that “Country First”?

Just how much does McCain actually care about America to be so utterly irresponsible as to put Sarah Palin in such a position. That decision may be a lot of things, but it is certainly not “Country First”. There are so many reasons that Sarah would be a disaster as President, but they are all summed up in the brilliant Saturday Night Live parody . I suppose almost everyone has seen it, but if you are the one who hasn’t, take a look at it, you’ll see what I mean. What else could I possibly say to prove my point about Sarah?

But this election is not about Sarah, it’s about a choice between John McCain and Barack Obama. This is a time when our country’s economy is being challenged by an economic meltdown that compares only to the meltdown that preceded the Great Depression, and John McCain has already admitted that he “doesn’t really understand economics“. This is a time when we face significant challenges in the Middle East, and yet, a couple of weeks ago hot-headed McCain goes looking for trouble with Russia saying “We are all Georgians.” I’m not a Georgian, and I don’t want to be. I don’t care what happens between the Georgians and the South Ossetians, do you? Let them settle their own problems. What is this man thinking? And that is my point. John McCain is an intellectual lightweight. He has, time and again, adopted any position on any subject for any reason at any moment.

Far from having built his foundation on a rock, he stands on shifting sands, loyal to no one, undependable for more that a moment at a time, mercurial in his alliances, and, in the end, nothing more than a falling leaf, blowing in the wind.

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